“I’ve never been called privileged in my life!” Ifemelu said. “It feels good.”
“I think I’ll switch and have him be Athena’s doctor. He was wonderful, so well-groomed and well-spoken. I haven’t been very satisfied with Dr. Bingham since Dr. Hoffman left, anyway.” Laura picked up the menu again. “In graduate school I knew a woman from Africa who was just like this doctor, I think she was from Uganda. She was wonderful, and she didn’t get along with the African-American woman in our class at all. She didn’t have all those issues.”
“Maybe when the African American’s father was not allowed to vote because he was black, the Ugandan’s father was running for parliament or studying at Oxford,” Ifemelu said.
Laura stared at her, made a mocking confused face. “Wait, did I miss something?”
“I just think it’s a simplistic comparison to make. You need to understand a bit more history,” Ifemelu said.
Laura’s lips sagged. She staggered, collected herself.
“Well, I’ll get my daughter and then go find some history books from the library, if I can figure out what they look like!” Laura said, and marched out.
Ifemelu could almost hear Kimberly’s heart beating wildly.
“I’m sorry,” Ifemelu said.
Kimberly shook her head and murmured, “I know Laura can be challenging,” her eyes on the salad she was mixing.
Ifemelu hurried upstairs to Laura.
“I’m sorry. I was rude just now and I apologize.” But she was sorry only because of Kimberly, the way she had begun to mix the salad as though to reduce it to a pulp.
“It’s fine,” Laura sniffed, smoothing her daughter’s hair, and Ifemelu knew that for a long time afterwards, she would not unwrap from herself the pashmina of the wounded.
APART FROM a stiff “Hi,” Laura did not speak to her at the party the next day. The house filled with the gentle murmur of voices, guests raising wineglasses to their lips. They were similar, all of them, their clothes nice and safe, their sense of humor nice and safe, and, like other upper-middle-class Americans, they used the word “wonderful” too often. “You’ll come and help out with the party, won’t you, please?” Kimberly had asked Ifemelu, as she always did of their gatherings. Ifemelu was not sure how she helped out, since the events were catered and the children went to bed early, but she sensed, beneath the lightness of Kimberly’s invitation, something close to a need. In some small way that she did not entirely understand, her presence seemed to steady Kimberly. If Kimberly wanted her there, then she would be there.
“This is Ifemelu, our babysitter and my friend,” Kimberly introduced her to guests.
“You’re so beautiful,” a man told her, smiling, his teeth jarringly white. “African women are gorgeous, especially Ethiopians.”
A couple spoke about their safari in Tanzania. “We had a wonderful tour guide and we’re now paying for his first daughter’s education.” Two women spoke about their donations to a wonderful charity in Malawi that built wells, a wonderful orphanage in Botswana, a wonderful microfinance cooperative in Kenya. Ifemelu gazed at them. There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take “charity” for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know—perhaps it came from having had yesterday and having today and expecting to have tomorrow. She envied them this.
A petite woman in a severe pink jacket said, “I’m chair of the board of a charity in Ghana. We work with rural women. We’re always interested in African staff, we don’t want to be the NGO that won’t use local labor. So if you’re ever looking for a job after graduation and want to go back and work in Africa, give me a call.”
“Thank you.” Ifemelu wanted, suddenly and desperately, to be from the country of people who gave and not those who received, to be one of those who had and could therefore bask in the grace of having given, to be among those who could afford copious pity and empathy. She went out to the deck in search of fresh air. Over the hedge, she could see the Jamaican nanny of the neighbors’ children, walking down the driveway, the one who always evaded Ifemelu’s eyes, and did not like to say hello. Then she noticed a movement on the other end of the deck. It was Don. There was something furtive about him and she felt rather than saw that he had just ended a cell phone conversation.
“Great party,” he told her. “It’s just an excuse for Kim and me to have friends over. Roger is totally out of his league and I’ve told him that, no chance in hell …”
Don kept talking, his voice too larded in bonhomie, her dislike clawing at her throat. She and Don did not talk like this. It was too much information, too much talk. She wanted to tell him that she had heard nothing of his phone conversation, if there had been anything at all to hear, that she knew nothing and that she did not want to know.
“They must be wondering where you are,” she said.
“Yes, we must go back,” he said, as though they had come out together. Back inside, Ifemelu saw Kimberly standing in the middle of the den, slightly apart from her circle of friends; she had been looking around for Don and when she saw him, her eyes rested on him, and her face became soft, and shorn of worry.
IFEMELU LEFT the party early; she wanted to speak to Dike before his bedtime. Aunty Uju picked up the phone.
“Has Dike slept?” Ifemelu asked.
“He’s brushing his teeth,” she said, and then in a lower voice, she added, “He was asking me about his name again.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The same thing. You know he never asked me this kind of thing before we moved here.”
“Maybe it’s having Bartholomew in the picture, and the new environment. He’s used to having you to himself.”
“This time he didn’t ask why he has my name, he asked if he has my name because his father did not love him.”
“Aunty, maybe it’s time to tell him you were not a second wife,” Ifemelu said.
“I was practically a second wife.” Aunty Uju sounded defiant, even petulant, clenching her fist tightly around her own story. She had told Dike that his father was in the military government, that she was his second wife, and that they had given him her surname to protect him, because some people in the government, not his father, had done some bad things.
“Okay, here’s Dike,” Aunty Uju said, in a normal tone.
“Hey, Coz! You should have seen my soccer game today!” Dike said.
“How come you score all the great goals when I’m not there? Are these goals in your dreams?” Ifemelu asked.
He laughed. He still laughed easily, his sense of humor whole, but since the move to Massachusetts, he was no longer transparent. Something had filmed itself around him, making him difficult to read, his head perennially bent towards his Game Boy, looking up once in a while to view his mother, and the world, with a weariness too heavy for a child. His grades were falling. Aunty Uju threatened him more often. The last time Ifemelu visited, Aunty Uju told him, “I will send you back to Nigeria if you do that again!” speaking Igbo as she did to him only when she was angry, and Ifemelu worried that it would become for him the language of strife.
Aunty Uju, too, had changed. At first, she had sounded curious, expectant about her new life. “This place is so white,” she said. “Do you know I went to the drugstore to quickly buy lipstick, because the mall is thirty minutes away, and all the shades were too pale! But they can’t carry what they can’t sell! At least this place is quiet and restful, and I feel safe drinking the tap water, something I will never even try in Brooklyn.”
Slowly, over the months, her tone soured.
“Dike’s teacher said he is aggressive,” she told Ifemelu one day, after she had been called to come in and see the principal. “Aggressive, of all things. She wants him to go to what they call special ed, where they will put him in a class alone and bring somebody who is trained to deal with mental children to teach him. I told the woman that it is not my son, it is her father who is aggressive. Look at him, just because he looks different, when he does what other little boys do, it becomes aggression. Then the principal told me, ‘Dike is just like one of us, we don’t see him as different at all.’ What kind of pretending is that? I told him to look at my son. There are only two of them in the whole school. The other child is a half-caste, and so fair that if you look from afar you will not even know that he is black. My son sticks out, so how can you tell me that you don’t see any difference? I refused completely that they should put him in a special class. He is brighter than all of them combined. They want to start now to mark him. Kemi warned me about this. She said they tried to do it to her son in Indiana.”
Later, Aunty Uju’s complaints turned to her residency program, how slow and small it was, medical records still handwritten and kept in dusty files, and then when she finished her residency, she complained about the patients who thought they were doing her a favor by seeing her. She hardly mentioned Bartholomew; it was as though she lived only with Dike in the Massachusetts house by the lake.